Rational Choice and the Victorian Voter
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1992.tb00705.x |
| Date | 01 September 1992 |
| Published date | 01 September 1992 |
| Author | Iain McLean |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Politicnl
Studies
(
1992).
XL,
496-5
I
5
Rational Choice and the Victorian Voter
IAIN
MCLEAN*
University
of
Warwick
Recent work on the relationship between politicians and voters in Victorian Britain is
surveyed. with particular attention
to
the administrations
of
Peel and Gladstone. It is
shown that rational-choice interpretations of behaviour may
be
more powerful than
traditional Namierite or structuralist approaches. But mainstream rational choice
alone is
too
thin
to
explain why
Peel
repealed the Corn Laws
or
why Gladstone tried
to
give Home Rule
to
Ireland.
The parliamentary and electoral politics of Britain from
1832
to
1914
have been
studied minutely. For example, after Gash and Kitson Clark
on
Peel, Shannon
and Matthew
on
Gladstone, Hanham and O'Leary
on
electioneering, and Lloyd
and Blewett
on
individual elections,' it may be felt that there is nothing left to
say. Yet under our noses a new American political science
of
British political
history has been developing. It has not discovered new sources but it has quarried
the traditional sources with greater sophistication than before, using (not always
explicit) rational-choice methods. There is scarcely a writer in the grand
historiography of Victorian Britain whom
it
does not challenge.
It
does not seem
to have drawn an adequate response. Its arguments have not been rejected but
they have fallen dead-born from the press in the UK.
Before
1867,
there are two unreconciled grand traditions: the tradition of
Namier and the structuralist tradition which includes, but is not restricted to,
Marx. Few historians are overt Namierites and fewer are overt Marxists but the
labels may be helpful. Namierites believe that ideology in politics matters not at
all and that interests, connections, influence and deference are the whole story.
What MPs said, either to their constituents or
in
Parliament, is therefore of little
*
With grateful thanks
to
Hugh Berrington, Gary Cox, Timothy
J.
McKeown, Jeremy Mitchell,
Robert Pahre, Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, Daniel Verdier. seminar participants at Stanford
University, the Editor of
Political Studies
and two referees for helpful comments on earlier versions;
and
to
University College. Oxford and Stanford University for financing the leave during which this
paper
was
drafted.
'
G. Kitson Clark, 'The electorate and the repeal
of
the Corn Laws',
Transactions qfthe
Royal
Historical Society,
5th series,
I
(1951).
109-26;
N.
Gash,
Politics in the Age
uf
Peel
(Hassocks,
Harvester, 2nd edn, 1977; originally published in 1953);
R.
Shannon.
Gludstone
(London, Hamish
Hamilton. 1982); H. C.
G.
Matthew,
Gladstot?e
1809-1874
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986)
-
a
collection
of
his introductions
to
successive volumes
of
Gladstone's diary, also published by the
Clarendon Press; H.
J.
Hanham,
Elections and Party Management in the Age
of
Disraeli and
Gladytone
(Hassocks, Harvester, 2nd edn,
1978;
originally published in 1959);
C.
O'Leary,
The
Elimination
of
Corrupt Prucfices
in
British
Elections
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962):
T.
Lloyd,
The
British General Election
of
I880
(London, Oxford University Press, 1968);
N.
Blewett,
The Peers, the
Parties and the People: the British General Elections
of
I910
(London, Maanillan, 1972). The above
works seem
to
be most frequently cited but no citation count has been done.
Note
that this
is
not
so
much a 'British school' as a 'Commonwealth school'.
0032-32 17/92/03/0496-20
0
1992
Political
Studies
IAIN
MCLEAN
497
interest; what they did was, by assumption, to further the interests with which
they were connected. Voters may have chosen how to vote out of deference or out
of interest; but
if
the latter, the interest which counted was that of the local
candidate, not of the chosen party programme. Namierites stress how different
the franchise was between 1832 and 1867 to the modern pattern. Norman Gash
quotes the chief Liberal agent in 1841 as having been convinced by
16
years’
experience
firstly; that
the
action
ofpolitical
principle and particular Cabinet policies on
the
English Borough Constituencies is much overrated; secondly; that the
returns are much more influenced by particular
local
circumstances and
the
particular personal relations
of
Candidares
than generally imagined; thirdly;
that
thereturnsaregreatlyinfluenced
by thesuficiencyandpurse
weight
ofthe
candidates.’
The structuralist tradition is economically determinist in a radically different
way. MPs are regarded as representing different socioeconomic interests, and the
classic struggles over factory legislation, the Corn Laws and the empire track the
rise and fall of those interests. No serious historian now sees a unilinear
progression from aristocratic to bourgeois to proletarian dominance;
all
stress
temporary alliances (such as that postulated between land and labour against
capital in order to get the factory legislation of the 1830s and 1840s carried). For
‘Marxists’, unlike ‘Namierites’, ideology matters a great deal. Sophisticated
structuralists discuss the intellectual hegemony of classical economics, with its
prescriptions of
laissez-faire
and cheap government, tracking its spread through
the governing class.3
The Second Reform Act of 1867 is widely regarded as a turning point, at which
the politics of influence gave way to the politics of electoral pressure.
Constituencies became too big to be managed on behalf of patrons: voters
responded more to candidates’ party labels and less to their willingness to dole
out favours; MPs’ voting behaviour came under stronger party discipline,
so
that
the ‘independent MP’ was virtually extinct by 1886. Driven by the widening
franchise, the party system changed rather quickly from rural v. urban to labour
v.
capital. This change imperilled and eventually destroyed the Liberal Party,
although whether its destruction should be dated to 1886, 19
15,
19
18
or 1924 is
still an open question. (But the strange death of Liberal England certainly did not
occur where Dangerfield first located it, between 191
1
and 19144.) The canonical
source for the argument that 1867 inaugurated modern politics remains Moisei
Ostrogorski’s
Democracy and the Organization
of
Political Parties.s
Recent work, mostly by American scholars, is relevant to these arguments but
has not been incorporated in them. The work discussed in this paper is the
attempt by Gary Cox to integrate quantitative studies of the parties
in
Parliament
with those of the parties in the electorate; the roll-call analysis of parliamentary
Quoted by Gash,
Polirics
in
/he Age
qf
Peel.
pp.
xxiv-v
(emphasis in original).
’
See
especially
L.
Brown,
The Boardof Trude
und
/he Free Trude Movemen/ 1830-1842
(Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1958). For a representative ‘Namierite’
see
D. C. Moore,
The Polirics qfDcference
(Hassocks, Harvester, 1976); for a representative ‘structuralist’,
S.
D. Krdsner, ’State power and the
structure
of
international trade’,
World Polirics,
28
(I
976).
3
17-47,
‘
G.
Dangerfield,
The Slrange Dearh
of
Liberal England
(London, Constdbk, 1936).
M. Ostrogorski,
Demorrucy
and
/he
Orgunisution
qf
Political Purries
(London, Macmillan,
1902).
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